The Chernihiv Theater was partially destroyed by a Russian missile strike in August 2023. Photo by Oliver Raw
Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, and despite the fact…
Essays
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Village scene in Santiniketan / Photo by Eric Parker / Flickr In a country where wanting to remain rural is a choice now only available to the wealthy, what does rural mean? Here, Sumana Roy conte…
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The Cemetery Mártires del 19 de Julio / Wikimedia In these chronicles of funeral workers in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, families gather in a cemetery the size of fifty soccer fields to try…
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Photo by Mistervlad / Stock.adobe.com An Argentine in Stockholm marvels over the Swedish language and Sweden’s culture.The first time I ever heard Swedish spoken was on a visit to Stockhol…
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Photo of the village of Oia by Baret Magarian Though Santorini is a place where the sensory gets top billing, it’s an island of sweeping contrasts. After an extended stay, Baret Magarian explor…
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Shizue Ogawa pays particular attention to the resonances between Western and Eastern culture that inspire her philosophical, aesthetic, and cosmic reflections. Here, Alice-Catherine Carl…
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Uemura Shōen (1875–1949), Snow / Wikimedia Commons Though it’s impossible to say which generation of Japanese women writers has had a larger influence on literature domestically and inter…
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It is an undisputed fact that women played an integral role in the development of modern Japanese literature. As early as the late nineteenth century, Ichiyō Higuchi broke through the literary establi…
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Photo by Mathias Reding / Unsplash.com An American teacher on a Fulbright in Kolkata encounters a surprising flashpoint in a classroom discussion of concrete nouns. In my earnest Ohio ac…
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Photo of fry bread courtesy of the author Desperately wanting to find a space to further her relationship with Native American food culture, a writer travels to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, thinking it…
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Illustration by Abigail Larson, Something Wrong?, ink, watercolor, digital media, 2023 Discussions of horror fiction often begin with attempts at a definition. Questions like “what is ‘ho…
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Photo of Imbros by Yakup Ahmet Baran / Stock.adobe.com The Turkish island of Imbros represents a historical anomaly of Mediterranean geopolitics. Matt A. Hanson traces the tenacious attempt by…
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Photo of Wole Soyinka by the author Inspired by a photo and the histories connected to it, a writer makes a film to mark Wole Soyinka’s ninetieth year. The photo of a young man of thirty-five, on…
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Photo of Chihuahuan Desert, Contrabando Area ~ Big Bend Ranch State Park by Gary Nored / flickr.com Can we tell stories, the author asks, “in a way that makes more breathing room, that does no…
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Photo of bus route in Buenos Aires by Carolina Jaramillo / Stock.adobe.com Taking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own. Around 2008 I made the unlikely deci…
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Photo of LGBTQ Pride March in Buenos Aires by Ari / Stock.adobe.com Each November, Buenos Aires’s Pride march proceeds down a ten-block stretch that is the “spine of Argentine history,” fulfilling…
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Photo of Once Quarter, Buenos Aires by Jordi Camí / Alamy.com Visiting the Jewish neighborhood of Once, a writer finds herself caught between a desire to escape the internet and a need to connect…
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Photo of Stadio Diego Armando Maradona by Stefano Tammaro / Stock.adobe.com Reflecting on his love of football, Oliverio Coelho has an epiphany: some players on the pitch stand out, not just…
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Photo by travelview / Stock.adobe.com Take a whirling tour of Buenos Aires’s secondhand bookstores and meet an array of eccentric reader types with porteño writer Matías Serra Bradford. A ci…
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Photo by nickalbi / Stock.adobe.com In any discussion of Buenos Aires, it’s probably useful to start out by defining our parameters. For the rest of the world, “Buenos Aires” conjures images of ta…
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Photo of monument to Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky by abs0lute / Stock.adobe.com Against increasing calls to “cancel” Dostoevsky due to the Russian nationalism espoused in his wr…
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Photo of Lebanon by Patricia Abdallah / Unsplash.com “Through a sort of grating irony,” writes Charif Majdalani, Lebanon “remains a sort of model but in the negative sense of the term, because it…
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Photo by Ella Ivanescu / Unsplash.com Climate change, resource depletion, extreme weapons, AI, and more: Richard Heinberg looks at the individual threats composing the unprecedented convergence of…
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Photo of Sandra Day O'Connor by Yousef Khanfar / www.yousefkhanfar.com Photographer Yousef Khanfar recalls his time with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in this tribute to the first female justice of…
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Photo by Shevaun Williams | shevaunwilliams.com After accepting the NSK silver medallion, certificate, and a check symbolizing the $35,000 award, Gene Luen Yang delivered a heartwarming story abou…